Korčula

I'm very lucky that my daughter shares my enthusiasm when it comes to visiting museum, galleries and historical sites. Therefore, it was natural that we decided to visit the Korčula Town Museum. My husband prefers historical sites and he's not so keen about museums, so he decided to pass this one.

Lady in Museum was pleasantly amazed to see that a child wants to visit the museum (while daddy decided to stay outside) that she did not want to charge us the admittance fee for her. "The custodian is out for a while, but he'll be back soon", she said. Now why that sounded so familiar to me? I started to think that custodians are always "somewhere out there", instead of where they should be, or they're avoiding ME. :o) But anyway, all information plates are more or less quite enough (but I'm not sure if they were so informative as well in other languages, since Serbian is almost the same language as Croatian, so there was no need to check other languages).

The prehistoric exhibition is placed in ground floor in a matching stone interior, giving out the impression of residential cave. Prehistoric artifacts are not numerous, but they're nicely arranged and mostly well preserved. The other part of the same floor is dedicated to Hellenic archeological artifacts. Ancient Greeks colonized the island around 3rd century BC, and lived here together with natives, Illyrians. The written proof is 3rd century BC tablet, found in Lumbarda (near town of Korčula) which contains a list of colonized Greeks and natives who received property on the island.

First floor was closed due to reconstruction works, so we couldn't see more archeological pieces.

On other floors we saw exhibitions of shipbuilding, seafaring and stone-cutting workshops of Korčula. There are several ships replicas and even one model of a shipbuilding workshop, which my daughter found most interesting and very cute, and I had to literally drag her out of that room after 20 minutes. The other display represents a 19th century house. There were many objects of every day use, from ladies jewelry to gentlemen pipes, writing desk with old writing material, old furniture and a collection of art and cultural heritage from 13th-20th century. Nice display, which pulls you back in past centuries and tickles you to imagine how it looked like at that time. You expect that when you look down from the balcony (which was not allowed for visitors, unfortunately), you'll see people dressed like Marco Polo walking around the square. By that time the custodian was back and he said that he will join us at the last floor.

The last floor was quite a surprise. I've visited this museum so long ago, that I've forgot what was in there. The last floor was more or less in its original state and obviously a kitchen. I was amazed: why the kitchen was on the last floor? Custodian explained us that until the end of 19th century all kitchens were on last floors, so the food smell, exactly the fish smell, could not spread through the house. Poor women had to go up and down the stairs to wash the dishes (some pieces were quite heavy), bring water and for cooking, wood for fire and food. Since they have put accent on authenticity, most of kitchen gadgets do not have tags and it's impossible to figure out what they were used for, without custodian's help. Stone walls were all around us, except for one middle-sized window, so it was quite dark. But I presume that big stone fireplace was giving enough light in the night, along with candles. I just couldn't figure out how did they ventilate this room, but I did not want to ask such stupid question. For me this kitchen was the most impressive part of the museum. And then I've realized that we forgot to bring our camera!